The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People

By Edward Alsworth Ross

The Old World in the New is a historical account of the immigration trends and patterns into the U.S. among various European peoples, from the Italians to the Irish. It covers several centuries of history, starting with the Puritans who arrived in the 17th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2019
• ISBN: 4064066233969

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Edward Alsworth Ross

The Old World in the New

The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066233969

Table of Contents

PREFACE

THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGINAL MAKE-UP OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

CHAPTER II

THE CELTIC IRISH

CHAPTER III

THE GERMANS

CHAPTER IV

THE SCANDINAVIANS

CHAPTER V

THE ITALIANS

CHAPTER VI

THE SLAVS

CHAPTER VII

THE EAST EUROPEAN HEBREWS

CHAPTER VIII

THE LESSER IMMIGRANT GROUPS

CHAPTER IX

ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION

CHAPTER X

SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION

CHAPTER XI

IMMIGRANTS IN POLITICS

CHAPTER XII

AMERICAN BLOOD AND IMMIGRANT BLOOD

APPENDIX

TABLE I

TABLE II

TABLE III

TABLE IV

TABLE V

TABLE VI

TABLE VII

TABLE VIII

TABLE IX

INDEX

PREFACE

Table of Contents

Immigration, said to me a distinguished social worker and idealist, is a wind that blows democratic ideas throughout the world. In a Siberian hut from which four sons had gone forth to America to seek their fortune, I saw tacked up a portrait of Lincoln cut from a New York newspaper. Even there they knew what Lincoln stood for and loved him. The return flow of letters and people from this country is sending an electric thrill through dwarfed, despairing sections of humanity. The money and leaders that come back to these down-trodden peoples inspire in them a great impulse toward liberty and democracy and progress. Time-hallowed Old-World oppressions and exploitations that might have lasted for generations will perish in our time, thanks to the diffusion by immigrants of American ideas of freedom and opportunity.

Rapt in these visions of benefit to belated humanity, my friend refused to consider any possible harm of immigration to this country. He did not doubt it so much as ignore it. How should the well-being of a nation be balanced against a blessing to humanity?

Think what American chances mean to these poor people! urged a large-hearted woman in settlement work. Thousands make shipwreck, other thousands are disappointed, but tens of thousands do realize something of the better, larger life they had dreamed of. Who would exclude any of them if he but knew what a land of promise America is to the poor of other lands? Her sympathy with the visible alien at the gate was so keen that she had no feeling for the invisible children of our poor, who will find the chances gone, nor for those at the gate of the To-be, who might have been born, but will not be.

I am not of those who consider humanity and forget the nation, who pity the living but not the unborn. To me, those who are to come after us stretch forth beseeching hands as well as the masses on the other side of the globe. Nor do I regard America as something to be spent quickly and cheerfully for the benefit of pent-up millions in the backward lands. What if we become crowded without their ceasing to be so? I regard it as a nation whose future may be of unspeakable value to the rest of mankind, provided that the easier conditions of life here be made permanent by high standards of living, institutions and ideals, which finally may be appropriated by all men. We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their surplus millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we have helped them infinitely more by protecting our standards and having something worth their copying when the time came.

Edward Alsworth Ross.

The University of Wisconsin,

Madison, Wisconsin,

September, 1914.

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THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW

Table of Contents

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CHAPTER I

Table of Contents

THE ORIGINAL MAKE-UP OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Table of Contents

God sifted a whole nation that He might send choice grain into the wilderness. So thought the seventeenth century of the migration to Massachusetts Bay in the evil years of Charles I; but what are we to think of it? There is to-day so little sympathy with that remote, narrow New England theocracy that it is well to state again in living terms what part the coming of the best of the English Puritans bore in building up the American people.

As history makers, those who will suffer loss and exile rather than give up an ideal that has somehow taken hold of them are well nigh as unlike ordinary folk as if they had dropped from Mars. In every generation those who are capable of heroic devotion to any ideal whatsoever are only a remnant. Nine persons out of ten incline to the line of least resistance or of greatest profit, and will no more sacrifice themselves for an ideal than lead will turn to a magnet.

That the ideal should be final is of small consequence. It matters little whether it is a religious tenet, a mode of worship, a method of life, or a state of society. The essential thing is that it stands apart from the appetites, passions, and petty aims that govern most of us. Those who will face panther and tomahawk for the sake of their ideal are not to be swayed by the sordid motives and fitful passions that lord it over commonplace lives. Holding themselves to be instruments for the fulfilment of some larger purpose, men of this type make their mark upon the world. The fathers dedicate themselves to establishing godliness in the community. Their posterity fly to arms in behalf of the principle of No taxation without representation. Their posterity, in turn, war upon the liquor traffic, slavery, or imperialism. As surely as one quarter of us are still of the blood of the twenty thousand Puritans who sought the wilderness between 1618 and 1640, so surely are there ideals not yet risen above the horizon that will inspire Americans in the generations to come.

The Dutch settled New Amsterdam from practical motives, although some of them were Walloons fleeing oppression in the Spanish Netherlands. Gain prompted the peopling of Virginia, and that colony received its share of human chaff. The Council of Virginia early complained that "it hurteth to suffer Parents to disburden themselves of lascivious sonnes, masters of bad servants and wives of ill husbands, and so clogge the

business with such an idle crue, as did thrust themselves in the last voiage, that will rather starve for hunger, than lay their hands to labor."

immigrant

Photograph by Hine

Immigrant Women in Line for Inspection at Ellis Island

In 1637 the collector of the port of London averred that most of those that go thither ordinarily have no habitation ... and are better out than within the kingdom. After the execution of Charles I, a number of Royalist families removed to Virginia rather than brook the rule of Cromwell. This influx of the well-to-do registers itself in an abrupt increase in the size of the land-grants and in a sudden rise in the number of slaves. From this period one meets with the names of Randolph, Madison, Monroe, Mason, Marshall, Washington and many others that have become household words. On the whole, however, the exodus of noble Cavaliers to Virginia is a myth; for it is now generally admitted that the aristocracy of eighteenth-century Virginia sprang chiefly from members of the country gentry, merchants and tradesmen and their sons and relatives, and occasionally a minister, a physician, a lawyer, or a captain in the merchant service, fleeing political troubles at home or tempted by the fortunes to be made in tobacco.

Less promising was the broad substratum that sustained the prosperity of the colony. For fifty years indentured servants were coming in at a rate from a thousand to sixteen hundred a year. No doubt many an enterprising wight of the English or Irish laboring-class sold himself for a term into the tobacco-fields in order to come within reach of beckoning Opportunity; but we know, too, that the slums and alleys were raked for material to stock the plantations. Hard-hearted men sold dependent kinsfolk to serve in the colonies. Kidnappers smuggled over boys and girls gathered from the streets of London and Bristol. About 1670, no fewer than ten thousand persons were spirited from England in one year. The Government was slow to strike at the infamous traffic, for, as was urged in Parliament, the plantations cannot be maintained without a considerable number of white servants.

Dr. Johnson deemed the Americans a race of convicts, who ought to be content with anything we allow them short of hanging. In the first century of the colonies, gallows'-birds were often given the option of servitude in the plantations. Some prayed to be hanged instead. In 1717 the British Government entered on the policy of penal transportation, and thenceforth discharged certain classes of felons upon the colonies until the Revolution made it necessary to shunt the muddy stream to Botany Bay. New England happily escaped these seven-year passengers, because she would pay little for them and because she had no tobacco to serve as a profitable return cargo. It is estimated that between 1750 and 1770 twenty thousand British convicts were exported to Maryland alone, so that even the school-masters there were mostly of this stripe. The colonies bitterly resented such cargoes, but their self-protective measures were regularly disallowed by the selfish home government. American scholars are coming to accept the British estimate that about 50,000 convicts were marketed on this side the water.

It is astonishing how quickly this yellow streak in the population faded. No doubt the worst felons were promptly hanged, so that those transported were such as excited the compassion of the court in an age that recognized nearly three hundred capital offenses. Then, too, the bulk were probably the unfortunate, or the victims of bad surroundings, rather than born malefactors. Under the regenerative stimulus of opportunity, many persons reformed and became good citizens. A like purification of sewage by free land was later witnessed in Australia. The incorrigible, when they did not slip back to their old haunts, forsook the tide-water belt to lead half-savage lives in the wilderness. Here they slew one another or were strung up by regulators, so that they bred their kind less freely than the honest. Thus bad strains tended to run out, and in the making of our people the criminals had no share at all corresponding to their original numbers. Blended with the dregs from the rest of the population, the convicts who were lazy and shiftless rather than criminal became progenitors of the poor whites, crackers, and sandhillers that still cumber the poorer lands of the southern Appalachians.

THE FRENCH HUGUENOTS

Probably no stock ever came here so gifted and prepotent as the French Huguenots. Though only a few thousand all told, their descendants furnished 589 of the fourteen thousand and more Americans deemed worthy of a place in Appletons' Cyclopedia of American Biography. In 1790 only one-half of one per cent. of our people bore a French name; yet this element contributed 4.2 per cent. of the eminent names in our history, or eight times their due quota. Like the Puritans and the Quakers, the Huguenots were of an element that meets the test of fire and makes supreme sacrifices for conscience' sake. They had the same affinity for ideals and the same tenacity of character as the founders of New England, but in their French blood they brought a sensibility, a fervor, and an artistic endowment all their own.

It was likewise a sturdy stock, and in the early days of the settlement it was no unusual thing for parties to walk from New Rochelle to church in lower New York, a distance of twenty-three miles. As a rule they walked this distance with bare feet, carrying their shoes in their hands.

THE GERMANS

When seeking settlers for his new colony, William Penn gained much publicity for it in Germany, where he had a wide acquaintance. The German Pietists responded at once, and a stream of picked families mingled with the English Quakers who founded the City of Brotherly Love. The first Germans to come were well-to-do people. Nearly all had enough money left on arrival to pay for the land they took up. In 1710, however, there arose in parts of Germany a veritable furor to reach the New World. The people of the ravaged Palatinate became agitated over the lure of America, and ship after ship breasted the Delaware, black with Palatines, Hanoverians, Saxons, Austrians, and Swiss. The cost of passage from the upper Rhine was equal to $500 to-day; but a vast number of penniless Germans got over the barrier by contracting with the ship-owner to sell themselves into servitude for a term of years. These were known as redemptioners, and their service was commonly for from four to six years. Before the Revolution not fewer than 60,000 Germans had debarked at Philadelphia, to say nothing of the thousands that settled in the South.

Although not without a sectarian background, this great immigration bears clearly an economic impress. The virtues of the Germans were the economic virtues; invariably they are characterized as quiet, industrious, and thrifty. Although Franklin wrote, Those who come to us are the most stupid of their own nation, he spoke of them later, before a committee of the House of Commons, as a people who brought with them the greatest of all wealth—industry and integrity, and characters that have been superpoised and developed by years of persecution. It is likely that the intellectual stagnation of the Pennsylvania Germans and the smallness of their contribution to American leadership has been due to pietistic contempt for education rather than to the natural qualities of the stock.

THE SCOTCH-IRISH

The flailing of the clans after the futile rising of 1745 made the Scots restless, and in the last twelve years of the colonial era 20,000 Highlanders sought homes in America. But most of our Scottish blood came by way of Ireland. Early in the eighteenth century the discriminations of Parliament against the woolen industry of Ireland, and against Presbyterianism, provoked the largest immigration that occurred before the Revolution. The Ulster Presbyterians were descended from Scotsmen and English who had been induced between 1610 and 1618 to settle in the north of Ireland, and who were, in Macaulay's judgment, as a class, superior to the average of the people left behind them. They cared for ideas, and at the beginning of the outflow there was probably less illiteracy in Ulster than anywhere else in the world. Entire congregations came, each headed by its pastor. The whole North is in a ferment, lamented an Irish archbishop in 1728. It looks as if Ireland were to send all her inhabitants hither, complained the governor of Pennsylvania. About 200,000 came over, and on the eve of the Revolution the stock was supposed to constitute a sixth of the population of the colonies. They settled along the frontier, and bore the brunt of the warfare with the savage. It was owing chiefly to them that the Quakers and Germans of Pennsylvania were left undisturbed to live up to their ideals of peace and non-resistance. In eminence, the lead of the Scotch-Irish has been in government, exploration, and war, although they have not been lacking in contributors to education and invention. In art and music they have had little to offer.

The outstanding trait of the Scotch-Irish was will. No other element was so masterful and contentious. In a petition directed against their immigration, the Quakers characterized them as a pernicious and pugnacious people who absolutely want to control the province themselves. The stubbornness of their character is probably responsible for the unexampled losses in the battles of our Civil War. They fought the Indian, fought the British with great unanimity in two wars, and were in the front rank in the conquest of the West. More than any other stock has this tough, gritty breed, so lacking in poetry and sensibility, molded our national character. If to-day a losing college crew rows so hard that they have to be lifted from their shell at the end of the boat-race, it is because the never-say-die Scotch-Irish fighters and pioneers have been the picturesque and glowing figures in the imagination of American youth.

Looked at broadly, the first peopling of this country owes at least as much to the love of liberty as to the economic motive. In the seventeenth century the peoples of the Old World seemed to be at odds with one another. Race trampled on race, and the tender new shoots of religious yearning were bruised by an iron state and an iron church. The rumor of a virgin land where the oppressed might dwell in peace drew together a population varied, but rich in the spirited and in idealists. What a contrast between the English colonies and those of the orthodox powers! For the intellectual stagnation of the French in Canada, thank Louis XIV, who would not allow Huguenots to settle in New France. Spain barred out the foreigner from her colonies, and even the Spaniard might not go thither without a permit from the Crown. Heretics were so carefully excluded that in nearly three centuries the Inquisition in Mexico put to death only 41 unreconciled heretics, a number surpassed in some single days [in Spain] in Philip II's time. No wonder Spanish-American history shows men swayed by greed, ambition, pride, or fanaticism, but very rarely by a moral ideal.

Let no one suppose, however, that, as were the original settlers, so must their descendants be. When you empty a barrel of fish fry into a new stream there is a sudden sharpening of their struggle for existence. So, when people submit themselves to totally strange conditions of life,

Death whets his scythe, and those who survive are a new kind of fittest.

slovaks

Photograph by Hine

Slovaks, Ellis Island

THE TOLL OF THE SEA

Were the Atlantic dried up to-day, one could trace the path between Europe and America by cinders from our steamers; in the old days it would have revealed itself by human bones. The conditions of over-sea passage then brought about a shocking